Biography Texts

11.05.14 :: PERSPECTIVES - ITV, UK

Well it aired on UK mainstream TV at 10pm and what a fascinating programme it was. Presented by the singer Emeli Sandé, the woman who always seemed to be everywhere at the London Olympics in 2012, it was a delightful hour on Planet Kahlo. Wonderful stuff. Perspectives is by far the best art documentary programme out there. Last time out it had Lowry, last week Magritte and now this.

Some of the things that might be well known but were fascinating when they appeared on the TV were:

Sande has a wonderful tattoo of Kahlo.

There is some jaw - dropping moving imagery of Frida in the US watching Diego at work.

Fascinating insightfs from people who knew here.

Film of Frida and Diego with Trotsky.

Film of Frida's collection of dolls and babies.

Arrived at her solo exhibition in mexico via ambulance.

Rumours of an affair with Josephine Baker.

Over 90 self portrait paintings.

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Frida's life began and ended in Mexico City, in her home known as the
Blue House. She gave her birthdate as July 7, 1910, but her birth certificate
shows July 6, 1907. Frida claimed this so because she wanted the year of her birth to cooincide with the
year of the outbreak of the Mexican revolution, because her life would begin with the birth of modern Mexico.

At age 6, Frida was stricken with polio, which caused her right leg
to appear much thinner than the other. It was to remain that way permanently.

When Frida entered high school she was a tomboy full of mischief who
became the ringleader of a rebellious group of mainly boys that continually
caused trouble in the National Preparatory School. This group pulled many
pranks, mainly on professors. It was also in the National Preparitory
School that Frida first came in contact with her future husband, the famous
Mexican muralist,
Diego Rivera. He was commissioned to paint a mural in
the school's auditorium.

On September 17, 1925, when she was 18, she was riding a bus in Mexico City when it was
struck by a trolley car. A metal handrail pierced her abdomen, exiting through her vagina. Her spinal
column was broken in three places. Her collarbone, some ribs, and her pelvis were
broken, and her right leg was fractured in 11 places. Her foot was dislocated and
crushed. No one thought she would live, much less walk again, but, after a month in the hospital, she went
home. Encased for months in plaster body casts, Kahlo began to paint lying in bed with a special
easel rigged up by her mother. With the help of a mirror, Kahlo began painting her trademark subject: herself. Of
the 150 or so of her works that have survived, most are self-portraits. As she later said, "I paint myself because I am so often alone, because I am the subject I know best."

Although Frida's recovery was miraculous (she regained her ability to
walk), she did have relapses of tremendous pain and fatigue all throughout
her life, which caused her to be hospitalized for long periods of time,
bedridden at times, and also caused her to undergo numerous operations.
She once joked that she held the record for the most operations. Frida
underwent about 30 in her lifetime. She also turned to alcohol, drugs,
and cigarettes to ease the pain of her physical suffering.

Once she was out and about after her accident, a close friend introduced
Frida to the artistic crowd of Mexico, which included Tina
Modotti (well
known photographer, actress, and communist) and
Diego Rivera.

Diego and Frida were married on August 21,1929. Their marriage consisted
of love, affairs with other people, creative bonding, hate, and a divorce
in 1940 that lasted only for one year. Their marriage has been called
the union between an elephant and a dove, because
Diego was huge and very
fat, and Frida was small (a little over 5 feet) and slender.

Despite
Diego's affairs with other women (one was with Frida's sister),
he helped in many ways.
Kahlo shared
Rivera's faith in communism and passionate interest in the indigenous cultures of Mexico.
Rivera encouraged Kahlo in her work, extolling her as authentic, unspoiled and primitive, and stressing the Indian aspects of her heritage. During this period "Mexicanidad," the fervent embrace of pre-Hispanic Mexican history and culture, gave great currency to the notion of native roots. At the same time, being seen as a primitive provided an avenue for recognition for a few women artists. Kahlo, who had Indian blood on her mother’s side, was of Hungarian-Jewish descent on her father’s side. Although initially a self-taught painter, she was, through her relationship with Rivera, soon travelling in the most sophisticated artistic circles. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that anyone who shared
Rivera’s life could have remained artistically naive.

Presumably because it generated respect and imparted credibility in the art world,
Kahlo encouraged the myth of her own primitiveness—in part by
adopting traditional Mexican dress—and it stayed with her throughout her career.

During her lifetime, Kahlo did not enjoy the same level of recognition
as the great artists of Mexican muralism,
Rivera, Orozco, and
Siqueiros. However, over the last two decades that has changed and today
Kahlo’ s idiosyncratic, intensely autobiographical work is critically and monetarily as prized as that of her male peers, sometimes more so.

Her paintings, rooted in 19th-century Mexican portraiture, ingeniously incorporated elements of
Mexican pop culture and pre-Columbian primitivism that, in the 1930s, had never been done
before. Usually small, intimate paintings that contrasted with the grand mural tradition of
her time, her work was often done on sheet metal rather than canvas, in the style of Mexican street artists who
painted retablos, or small votive paintings that offer thanks to the Virgin Mary or a saint for a miraculous
deliverance from misfortune.

Frida let out all of her emotions on a canvas. She painted her anger
and hurt over her stormy marriage, the painful miscarriages, and the physical
suffering she underwent because of the accident.

Kahlo who was so proud of her luxurious facial hair that she painted it right on to her self-portraits.

Frida, despite all of the hurt in her life, was an outgoing person whose
vocabulary was filled with 4 letter words. She loved to drink tequila
and sing off color songs to guests at the crazy parties she hosted. She
loved telling dirty jokes and shocking everyone around her. Frida amazed
people with her beauty and everywhere she went, people stopped in their
tracks to stare in wonder. Men were fascinated with her, and because of
this Frida had numerous, scandal filled affairs.

In 1936, Rivera, a dedicated Trotskyite, used his clout to
petition the Mexican government to give
Trotsky
and his wife asylum
after they were forced out of Norway. Rivera and Kahlo put up
the Trotskys in Kahlo's family home, where Kahlo seduced the
older man. (She painted a self-portrait dedicated to him that now hangs in Washington's NMWA.)

After Trotsky was assassinated, however, Kahlo turned on her old lover
with a vengeance, claiming in an interview that Trotsky was a coward and had
stolen from her while he stayed in her house (which wasn't true). "He irritated me
from the time that he arrived with his pretentiousness, his
pedantry because he thought he was a big deal," she said.
. Frida was later arrested
for his murder, but was let go.
Diego was also under suspicion for the
murder, but he was let go as well. Several years after
Trotsky's death,
Diego and Frida enjoyed telling people that they invited him to Mexico
just to get him killed, but no one knows if they were telling the truth
or not. They were fantastic story tellers.

The fact is that Kahlo turned on Trotsky because she had become a
devout Stalinist. Kahlo continued to worship Stalin even after it had become common
knowledge that he was responsible for the deaths of millions of people, not to mention Trotsky himself. One
of Kahlo's last paintings was called Stalin and I, and her diary is full of her
adolescent scribblings ("Viva Stalin!") about Stalin and her desire to meet him.

Frida also was a bisexual and had affairs with many women including the wife of the surrealist poet, Andre Breton.

All over the world, people loved Frida. When she went to France, she
was wined and dined by Picasso, and appeared on the cover of the French
Vogue. In America, people loved her beauty and her work. In Mexico, her
homeland, she had many great admirers.

Frida only had one exhibition in Mexico and it was in the spring
of 1953. Frida's health was very bad at this time and doctors told her
not to attend. Minutes after guests were allowed into the gallery, sirens
were heard outside. The crowd went crazy, for outside there was an ambulance
accompanied by a motorcycle escort. Frida Kahlo was being carried from
it into her exhibition on a hospital stretcher! The photographers and
reporters were shocked. She was placed in her bed in the middle of the
gallery. The mob of people went to greet her. Frida told jokes, entertained
the crowd, sang, and drank the whole evening. The exhibition was an
amazing success.

During the same year as her exhibition, Frida had to have her right
leg amputated below the knee due to a gangrene infection. This caused
her to become deeply depressed and suicidal.

She attempted suicide a couple of times. In 1954, suffering from pneumonia, Kahlo went to a Communist march to protest the U.S. subversion of the left-wing Guatemalan government. Four days later, she died in what may or may not have been a suicide.

No official autopsy was done.

Her last words in her
diary read:
"I hope the leaving is joyful and I hope never to return".

Texts :: Biog. II

The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) is one of the most important 20th century painters, and one of the few Latin American artists to have achiebed a global reputation. In 1983 her work was declared the property of the Mexican state.

Kahlo was one of the daughters of an immigrant German photographer and a Mexican woman of Indian extraction. Her life and work were more inextricably interwoven than in almost any other artist's case.

Two events in her life were of crucial importance. When she was eighteen, a bus accident put her in hospital for a year with a smashed spinal column and fractured pelvis. It was in her sick bed that she first started to paint. Then, aged twenty-one, she married the world-famous mural-artist Diego Rivera. She was to suffer the effects of the accident her whole life long, and was particularly pained by her inability to have children.

Her arresting pictures, most of them small-format self-portraits, express the burdens that weighed upon her soul: her unbearable physical pain, the grief that Rivera's occasional affairs prompted, the sorrow her childlessness caused her, her homesickness when living abroad and her longing to feel that she had put down roots, profound loneliness. But they also declare her passionate love for her husband, he pronounced sensuousness, and her unwavering survival instinct. Diego Rivera once described her work as being

"as loveble as a beautiful smile and as cruel as the bitterness of life".

Quick Links

Diary of Frida Kahlo

Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1919- 1954) kept this haunting journal during the last decade of her life, preoccupied with death, beset by declining health, isolation and repeated surgical operations resulting from the bus accident that severely damaged her spine, pelvic bones, right leg and right foot at the age of 18. This facsimile edition reproduces her handwritten, colored-ink entries and accompanying self-portraits, sketches, doodles and paintings, which fuse surrealism, pre-Columbian gods and myths, biomorphic forms, animal-human hybrids, archetypal symbols.

Ardent entries and love letters mirror her obsessive devotion to her husband, painter Diego Rivera. In his moving introduction, Mexican critic/novelist/poet Fuentes relates Kahlo's images of pain, loss, mutilation and transcendence to Mexico's historic cycles of revolution and reaction. Lowe, author of the study Frida Kahlo, ably places the journal in the context of the painter's shattered life.

Sprinkled with irony, black humor, even gaiety, and augmented with translations of the diary entries plus commentaries and photographs, this volume is a testament to Kahlo's resilience and courage.

Frida Kahlo :: Her Photos

When Frida Kahlo died in 1954, her husband Diego Rivera asked the poet
Carlos Pellicer to turn her family home, the fabled Blue House, into a museum. Pellicer
selected some paintings, drawings, photographs, books and ceramics, maintaining the
space just as Kahlo and Rivera had arranged it to live and work in. The rest of the objects, clothing, documents, drawings and letters, as well as over 6,000 photographs collected by Kahlo over the course of her life, were put away in bathrooms that had been converted into storerooms.

This incredible trove remained hidden for more than half a century, until, just a few years ago, these storerooms and wardrobes were opened up.
Kahlo's photograph collection was a major revelation among these finds, a testimony to the tastes and interests of the famous couple, not only through the images themselves but also through the telling annotations inscribed upon them. Photography had always been a part of
Kahlo's life-her father Guillermo Kahlo was one of the great Mexican photographers
at the beginning of the twentieth century-and her collection constitutes a roll call of great photographers:
Man Ray, Brassai, Martin Munkacsi, Pierre Verger, George Hurrel, Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, Manuel and
Lola Alvarez Bravo, Gisele Freund and many others, including Kahlo herself. It is likely that many of the unattributed photographs in the collection were taken by her, though we can only be sure of the few that she decided to sign in 1929.

Frida Kahlo: Her Photos allows us to speculate about Kahlo's and Rivera's likes and dislikes, and to document their family origins; it supplies a thrilling and hugely significant addition to our knowledge
of Kahlo's life and work.

Latest Updates

Update :: March 2013

Added: below a few low quality scans of my photographs of Frida Kahlo. All from that treasure trove of a book: Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. I have to say that over the years it has become my favourite book and the one I go back to time and again. So many wonderful artists with so many illustrations, photos of them relaxing and working and informative texts throughout...when I'm feeling down I just open it and never fail to find something which takes me out of myself. Extraordinary rememedies for ordinary woes. Superb! Also added biog. & gallery of that underrated female surrealist Kay Sage Tanguy. Same too for the mercurial Toyen

This is an iconic photo of Frida Kahlo. Cunningham has caught the haunting eyes that bewitch the viewer in so many of her Self Portraits. She would have been in her early 20s at the time; a beautiful young woman with those eyes troubled and troubling.

Update :: Feb. 2013

Added: photographs of Frida Kahlo contemporary, Nusch Eluard. Didn't have alot on this page before and would like to add more as she really was a fascinating woman. If you have any thoughts or facts on her please e-mail here and I will add them as she doesn't seem to be adequately covered on the internet.

Recommendation

Highest Recommendation: I've got in some of the Frida Kahlo cotton canvas prints and they are absolutely wonderful. They have a depth that no ordinary print could possibly have. That is why I am selling each with not only a full money back guarantee but also an offering of paying your return postage (uninsured mail) should you be dissatisfied with the print for whatever reason. That is how confident I am that you will love the print.